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Simple American Podcast with Jona Hildreth – Guest Appearance

Todd Hagopian Discusses Bipolar Journey, Business, and Politics on The Simple American Podcast

Todd Hagopian, founder of the Stagnation Intelligence Agency and authority on corporate transformation, joined host Jona Hildreth on The Simple American podcast for a wide-ranging conversation. The episode covered Hagopian’s journey with being bipolar, his new book launching in January, his business career and the businesses he owns, politics, and more. The conversation offered listeners insight into how personal challenges and professional achievement intersect in Hagopian’s multifaceted career.

Table of Contents

What Is The Simple American Podcast?

The Simple American is a podcast hosted by Jona Hildreth that features conversations with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders on topics spanning business, politics, and personal journeys. The show maintains an active presence across multiple platforms and publishes a newsletter for ongoing audience engagement.

Host Jona Hildreth brings genuine curiosity to conversations that explore both professional achievement and personal experiences. The show can be found at simpleamericannews.com, with Hildreth active on X @JonaTHildreth and Instagram @jona_hildreth.

What Topics Did Todd Hagopian and Jona Hildreth Discuss?

The conversation between Todd Hagopian and Jona Hildreth covered five main topics: Hagopian’s journey with being bipolar, his new book coming out in January, his business career, the businesses he owns, and politics. This wide-ranging discussion provided listeners with insight into how these different dimensions of Hagopian’s life connect and inform each other.

The bipolar journey discussion explored how Hagopian has navigated mental health challenges while building a successful career in corporate transformation. His openness about this experience reflects a broader trend of leaders sharing authentic personal stories alongside professional accomplishments.

The business conversation addressed both Hagopian’s corporate career as an authority on transformation and his entrepreneurial ventures as a business owner. This dual perspective offers valuable insight for listeners interested in both corporate leadership and entrepreneurship.

Who Is Todd Hagopian?

Todd Hagopian is the founder of the Stagnation Intelligence Agency, an entrepreneur, and an authority on corporate transformation. Known as the Stagnation Assassin, he helps organizations overcome the patterns that trap businesses in declining performance.

His forthcoming book “The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox” launches in January 2026. The book is available for preorder through Amazon.

Hagopian maintains an active social media presence on X @ToddHagopian and Instagram @stagnationassassin. His transformation resources are available at toddhagopian.com.

Where Can You Listen and Connect?

The Simple American episode featuring Todd Hagopian is available on major podcast platforms. Listeners can find more content and subscribe to the newsletter at thesimpleamerican.beehiiv.com.

Connect with The Simple American:

  • Website: simpleamericannews.com
  • X: @TSimpleAmerican

Connect with Jona Hildreth:

  • X: @JonaTHildreth
  • Instagram: @jona_hildreth

Connect with Todd Hagopian:

  • Website: toddhagopian.com
  • X: @ToddHagopian
  • Instagram: @stagnationassassin

Frequently Asked Questions

Who hosts The Simple American podcast?

The Simple American podcast is hosted by Jona Hildreth, who can be found on X @JonaTHildreth and Instagram @jona_hildreth.

What is the Stagnation Intelligence Agency?

The Stagnation Intelligence Agency is an organization founded by Todd Hagopian focused on corporate transformation and helping businesses overcome stagnation.

What is Todd Hagopian’s book about?

“The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox” is Todd Hagopian’s forthcoming book launching in January 2026 that draws on his journey with bipolar disorder and his expertise in corporate transformation.

What topics were discussed on the episode?

The conversation covered Todd Hagopian’s journey with being bipolar, his new book coming out in January, his business career, the businesses he owns, and politics.

People Also Ask

Who is Todd Hagopian?

Todd Hagopian is the founder of the Stagnation Intelligence Agency, an entrepreneur, and an authority on corporate transformation. He is known as the Stagnation Assassin and has a forthcoming book launching in January 2026.

What is The Simple American?

The Simple American is a podcast and media platform hosted by Jona Hildreth, featuring conversations on business, politics, and personal journeys. The show publishes a newsletter and maintains presence at simpleamericannews.com.

Podcast Transcript

Host: On today’s show, I have the founder of the Stagnation Intelligence Agency and an authority on corporate transformation, the Stagnation Assassin, Todd Hagopian. Todd, thanks for coming on to the show.

Todd: Hey, man. Thanks a lot for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Host: Yeah, me too. I’ve been following you on X for a long time. I love your content, so I was really happy that you were able to do this and give me a couple minutes here to jump on. I want to start off with your journey with being bipolar. Tell me about that and how you were able to overcome that.

Todd: Sure. Thank you for the question. It’s an important part of this whole story. I traveled through climbing the corporate ladder for about 15 years undiagnosed. Right from about 20 to 35, I got into these jobs, started doing really well, was moving up, and every time something good happened, something bad would happen right afterwards. It was that self-sabotage syndrome that people get. Never really thought much of it because it always felt like it was that work hard, play hard mentality — it’s just going to happen.

Finally in my mid-30s, it got bad. It got to the point where something’s not right here. I finally went in. I had some chest pains and headaches and I was like, something’s not right. I have two kids now at that point — I have four now — but at that point I was like, I just can’t just disappear one day. So I need to go get this taken care of, figure out what’s happening. They were throwing everything at me trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Finally they were like, “Have you ever seen a psychiatrist?” And I thought that was such a weird question. The reason they asked is because I’d been sleeping maybe two hours a day for 15 years. I just never slept.

By the time I got into the psychiatrist, it was a real quick, “Yeah, you’re really, really bipolar.” And then the second psychiatrist said the same thing. And you know how it is when you hear something and you only hear the part you want to hear. They would explain bipolar. For those who don’t understand what bipolar is — because not many people do — you’ve got these hypomanic highs. What that looks like is a lot of energy, tons of focus, Grandiose Goal Setting, really pumped up. Those are the good things. When you talk about bipolar billionaires, those are the things that those guys have and that’s how they’ve become so successful. Then you have these super low bipolar depression states, and you oscillate in between them. Sometimes you’re high more than low.

When I was hearing all this, I was like, man, that’s great. I love the hypomanic stuff. That explains everything. I’ll just lean into that and get even better. And then even worse, they said these pills that we’re going to put you on, they’ll fix your headaches and the bipolar. And I said, great, just give me the headache dose. Now that I know about the bipolar, I’ll be fine. That didn’t work out. So about six months later, I’m back in there going, “Okay, I need the full dose. We’re going to quit drinking. We’re going to get on the bipolar medication. We’re going to start sleeping.”

Man, that worked. Everything worked great. I suddenly felt better. I was more present. I was sleeping better. But my entire hypomanic edge that I had in business just went away at a time when I could not afford it. I had just gotten a big promotion — global marketing director for ITW, a large company. I just could not afford to be normal. I had to be the guy who had been getting promoted. I was like, man, do I really have to pick between sanity and success? This does not seem fair. Doesn’t seem right.

So I decided that I needed to hack my brain and weaponize my wiring and try to figure out if I could mimic the hypomania while staying healthy. I did that a few different ways. Turned around one business, turned around a second business, and by the time I got to a third business, I realized in the 13th month of that turnaround that I had forgotten to do something that I had done in the first one. I was like, “Oh, I need to write this stuff down.” So I did that, and that’s how this whole thing came about. That’s why I finally decided to come out as bipolar and let people know — because I put it together, turned around the fourth business real fast, and then I was like, I think I can teach people this.

Not only is it important for me to have people know because bipolar carries with it its own risk of suicide and all this stuff, and it’s better that people have an eye on me as I’m going through my business. But also it’s good for me to be able to teach other people, and for people to realize that there’s some real value in neurodivergence in the workplace. There’s some value to listening to those folks. They do bring different values to the table. It’s not something that needs to be fixed. It’s something that needs to be focused.

Host: Absolutely. That’s super inspirational. Tell me, were there any particular moments from 20 to 35 when you were at the highest of highs and lowest of lows? Were there any particular moments where you’re like, man, something might really be off here? I mean, you kind of touched on the sleep thing. I don’t even know how you were functioning at two hours of sleep.

Todd: There were plenty of moments. I’m on the libertarian side of things on politics, but for years I was convinced I was going to be president of the United States. So there’s a little bit of grandiose goal setting there — grandiose thinking and thoughts of grandeur. I had probably two or three times almost checked myself in. It’s a little different — your age versus my age is probably a little different. Back then, if you checked yourself in, you went in. That’s how you figured — you weren’t getting back out.

That was really bad. What would happen is you’d hit those lows and it’d be like, man, I need to do something otherwise something bad’s going to happen. I’m talking suicidal ideation every morning, just trying to get through the morning. If I got through the morning, I’d be okay, but the mornings were real bad.

The worst part about the highs and lows is during the highs you’re setting goals, you’re promising things, you’re doing this, doing that, and then you hit the low and it’s like, “Oh my god, what did I sign up for?” And now I got to figure out how to do it and I’m down in the dumps for no reason. I have no idea why. I’m just down here and I can’t do it. On the sleep thing, during the lows you wouldn’t have that hypomania. I’d be falling asleep at red lights, taking naps at lunch, going to McDonald’s.

The drinking was getting real bad. I was drinking a liter a night for 15 years. You could do that when you’re 20. Not so much when you’re 34, 35 — it starts to hit you a little different. I’d be getting into work drunk and sobering up around noon, going to take a nap, and then coming back in at 1:00. It was getting pretty bad at that point. There were plenty of times when I was telling myself, man, something’s not right. But I’m not going to go get it checked out because then I’m in trouble. As soon as it’s got a name, we’re going to be done with this, and I’m having a lot of fun. So we’re not going to mess with that. That’s one of the reasons that after I got diagnosed, I went eight years without really telling anybody except for a handful of folks, because I still didn’t know how people would take it.

Host: So you kind of talked about the process and when you finally got medicated, how that made a big difference for you, but then you kind of lost that high, that inspiration, that drive that you got from your bipolar disorder once you got on that medication. Talk to me about the adjustment there and then what were some of the things that you were able to develop or mental things that you were able to start utilizing to get that drive back that you lost.

Todd: The biggest adjustment, believe it or not, was just not having 23 hours a day, 22 hours a day anymore. That’s a pretty big adjustment because I was very used to getting home at 6:30, putting the kids to bed, having a drink with my wife, her going to bed at 10:00, and then me having three more hours to get stuff done. When you start sleeping, you don’t have those three hours anymore. That was probably the biggest adjustment — just not having the time. And then also the focus, being able to just zero in on something and work until it’s done for 6 hours straight, and knock it out all night long, three days in a row or whatever you need to do to get something done.

What I really needed to do was get more efficient with my time. A lot of the tools that I’ve developed is all about making sure that I spend every minute of the day making as much money as I can. The 80/20 Matrix of Profitability is one of the tools. We call it 80/20 squared. It’s almost a souped-up version of the Pareto principle, and only a handful of companies really ever do the Pareto principle. I learned from a couple of them — ITW and Berkshire Hathaway. Then I took it one step further and said 80/20 squared, which is really the top 4% of your actions are going to drive your top 64% of your results.

I schedule my calendar in an extreme way. I only read about 10% of my emails that come in. I’ve got 18,000 unread emails. I only take a meeting if I’m making money in that meeting. I only let other people schedule meetings if they’re only making money. It helps drive everybody towards very focused work. It’s recreating that focus.

The Karelin Method of explosive productivity is the same thought process. It’s activity times efficiency — that’s what a lot of people do. If I work harder and I’m more efficient, I get more done. If I work 20% more hours and I’m 20% more efficient, theoretically I’m going to get 44% more work done. I times it. The third part is focus. Activity times efficiency times focus. The idea there is if you’re going to do a hundred different things during your week and spend half hour to a couple hours on each of them, I might spend all 40 hours on three or four things. I just carve my schedule out that way. Then all of a sudden you’re 500 to 600% more productive because you’re putting all your time in.

How do you do that? You systematize the other stuff. You automate the other stuff. You AI the other stuff. You outsource the other stuff. Or you just kill it — take it right off your plate. There’s some other ones as well. Continuous improvement — I’ve got some methodologies there. And then Grandiose Goal Setting might be the interesting one. I think underpromising and overdelivering is for losers. I’ve been in business long enough — people tell you to do it all the time. I hate it so much. If you promise 6% and you make 9, yeah, you’re going to get your bonus. If I promise 25 and I make 19, I’m going to get the promotion because I grew twice as fast as you. I’ve promoted enough people that I know I’m promoting the 19 guy, not the 9 guy.

Now there’s limits to that. You can’t just miss by 20% every year. You also have to be good to implement this hypomanic toolbox. If you’re not ready to be really good at business, it’s not for you. This is for business transformation.

Then I think the coolest one is actually the orthodoxy-smashing innovation, because this anybody can replicate, but it’s exactly how a bipolar mind works. What it basically is — you think about all the orthodoxies in your industry, all the things that you think are true and everyone thinks are true, and then you start asking one by one: what if that’s not true? What would happen? How would the industry change? What would I do differently?

If you’ve got an industry where it’s a super expensive product and super long lead time and the whole industry is just 12 to 14 months, that’s what it is, it’s too expensive to make before somebody orders it — well, what if we did build it before someone orders it? What if we had a three-month lead time, six-month lead time? What would happen if we did that? How much would it cost? How would we do that? You could do the same thing with products. The orthodoxy-smashing innovation is really replicating how a bipolar mind looks at things because they’re not constrained by the box. That’s one that I really had to teach myself to do.

Host: On that topic, I’m curious to know what would that look like for the media industry in your opinion?

Todd: Give me an example — like podcasting?

Host: Sure. Podcasting or let’s just say a newspaper business.

Todd: Go both of those. So newspaper business — for years it was always like you have to focus on the actual paper instead of the online. Then people said, well, what if you made it online and you made it so that people had to pay for it after three articles? We’ve all seen that model. You have to monetize it, you got to make money, otherwise how are we going to make a business? Well, somebody eventually looked at that and said that’s really not going to work. There’s so much free information out there, why would people pay for your news?

Then people smashed the orthodoxy and said, well, okay, now we just need to produce as much content as possible to get as many eyeballs as possible for free and make money in other ways. Then they found out how to monetize the platforms in ways where they don’t have to make money by the user.

Now going forward, there’s even more orthodoxy smashing. Right now you’re talking about Grok and these AI tools that are just completely going to smash the media industry. Are they going to kill it? No. That’s not how it’ll work. How all these AI and automation tools are going to be is the people who learn how to use them and make themselves explosively productive are going to be the ones that win.

I can make a 60-minute webinar and structure it in such a way that it turns into an opening and a closing and then five 10-minute webinars so that I can chunk those up and kick them out. I can take those 10-minute webinars and put them through an AI tool that’ll kick out five shorts for each 10-minute video. Now all of a sudden I’ve got about 63 videos that I could put out in a week. I could take all 63 of those videos, turn them into articles. Now I’ve got 60 articles in a week. You can use AI in different ways. You can take that same article and say, turn this into a Q&A article, turn this into a checklist.

That’s how it’s going to change the game because you’ll be able to reach maybe five different audiences or 50 different audiences with the exact same thing and you’ll be a content machine. The people who do it right are going to be the ones that actually write something and then use their own ideas to drive all of those things. Every single thing is going to sound like you, be you — no hallucinations. The people who are lazy at it are going to be the ones that have very generic content that’s already getting caught by SEO and AEO. Being able to adjust with the algorithm is going to be huge going forward.

Host: Going back to you changing your mindset once you got medicated — what were your inspirations? Were you reading books to gain this knowledge to give yourself a leg up, or what were your tools or resources?

Todd: A lot of what it was was taking a look at things we had done before and saying, okay, how did we do 50 projects in 50 weeks? Continuous improvement projects — how did we get that done? What was the thought process behind it? And then thinking about what I was doing now on the medicine.

Before it was like, oh man, I got to sign up for this stuff, I got to promise it. I need to map it all out ahead of time and come up with this elaborate thing on how we’re going to get it done. Whereas the continuous improvement projects we were doing before was like pick one thing, knock it out in six weeks, have six of those going at a time. Nobody’s on more than one project. Then at the six-week mark, we come up with six new things that popped up and nail them again.

Now, that’s not traditional continuous improvement. People aren’t used to doing small projects to go after one thing and then waiting six weeks and seeing what pops up next to go after the next thing. They like having the five big projects that they put out there at the beginning of the year. They take their five best guys, put them on every project, which takes them out of their normal day-to-day job. And your best guys have the most important jobs. So now you’ve taken them out of their jobs that they deliver the dollars.

It was about like, okay, how do we structure that in a way that it’s hypomanic, but on purpose? Not just me saying, oh, this is what I’m excited about for the next five weeks. We’re going to structure this out — here’s the next six weeks and then four weeks after that, so that we’re always moving.

Then the Karelin Method was really about nailing it down and trying to get serious about your calendar. That one I didn’t really learn until about the third turnaround. I actually got fired — I got laid off during COVID — and I looked back and I was like, man, what did I do wrong here? The short answer is I turned it around about 3 months too late. When you’re a turnaround manager, you only get 18 to 24 months and then you’re out. They’re actually killing it right now. We landed the deal about a week after I left that would have kept me.

I looked at it and was like, what did I do wrong? At the end of the day, what I did wrong is I was being busy instead of productive. I was scheduling all these meetings that didn’t make any sense, just staying busy and trying to throw time and money at it when I really needed to throw focus at it. I learned a lot of it through trial and error. It wasn’t like I was reading bipolar books. I was trying to figure out what I did before that I was doing differently inherently now.

Host: So it was all just learning as you went — what was working, what didn’t — and then that all clicked for you. That’s a great segue. You’ve got a new book coming out called The Unfair Advantage. Is it kind of your story with being bipolar and what you learned through there? Give me a little bit of background with the inspiration for the book.

Todd: I’ve actually got a three-book deal right now with Koehler Books. The first book is a business fiction book, and I love business fiction. My favorite book out there is The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a business fiction novel that reads real easy but lays out a whole system of how to get something done. It’s different than reading non-fiction because you can think back and be like, “Oh, remember that one scene where he did this?” You can think back to it and grab it real easy.

So I decided to write this first book as that. I actually used a shopping cart manufacturer as the basis of it, which of course is one of the jobs I’ve had in the past — actually the one I got fired from. But it was good because I knew everything about it. I could talk with authority on the wire and the innovation and the problems that you would have with launching a different model. So it flowed. It’s not a true story, but it felt real.

Host: What’s the title of that book?

Todd: That is The Unfair Advantage. It’s a business fiction novel about a shopping cart president. They’re essentially failing. He’s got 6 months to turn around the business, runs into a bipolar billionaire that has the system, and the bipolar billionaire takes him under his wing and says, “Hey, if you’re in for a big, fast transformation that’s hard, I can show you how to do this.” Then they walk through it together.

The second book will be a deep dive into the actual non-fiction — okay, these are all the things that happened in that book, this is how you do it, this is why you do it, this is when you do it. And then the third book is a metrics book — these are the three metrics you need in order to turn around a business, and this is really all you need to care about. If you tell me what these look like in your business, I can tell you exactly where you are in the turnaround and what has to happen next.

Host: You can buy the book — I see it’s on Amazon. Is The Unfair Advantage out yet or is it coming out in January?

Todd: It’s pre-order right now and it’ll come out January 20th.

Host: I’m going to make sure I leave a link in the description so people can check that out as well. When will the other two books be out? Do you have a timeline for those?

Todd: First one’s January, second one’s July ’26, and then the third one will be January ’27.

Host: Awesome. Looking forward to reading those. I’m definitely going to make sure I get The Unfair Advantage and start there. I also want to talk to you more dialed into your business career. Obviously, when I was doing a little preparation for this interview, I saw that you kind of started out in the manufacturing industry and then it seems like you became more of a consultant, helping to turn businesses around, help transform businesses. Talk to me about the start of your business career and then what led you to what you’re doing now.

Todd: I popped out of school — it took a long time to get through school, obviously bipolar. I was working full-time, drinking like crazy. It took a while to get through school. Popped out as a financial adviser at American Express. That was really commission only. It was right up my style, trying to work 80 hours a week. Did real well there.

Got a bank manager job at 25. They came in and it was cool because they basically saw what I did at American Express and said, “We want you to come into this real conservative bank and just shake everything up. We’re going to have to close this bank branch.” So it was my first chance to turn something around. I was young and dumb and just came in and did all kinds of crazy things from financial advisor world inside of a bank. We turned the bank around.

Then I started looking into what does it take to run a company. Basically what I found out is that you need an MBA. It sounds dumb and it’s not necessarily the most helpful thing, but you do learn a lot. So I went back and got my MBA, popped out into manufacturing. Got a manager job at Whirlpool Corp making appliances. Did that in varying roles for six years, moved up.

Ended up getting an offer from a guy who had worked at Whirlpool, reached out and said, “I want you to come and develop a marketing department for this business-to-business company.” I was like, man, business-to-business sounds so boring — making appliances and selling them to people, being in the news all the time and on the radio and everything, it’s just a lot more exciting to make something that everyone’s using. Now I’m going to be making this product that some random business will use in their process.

The first product was a grocery store scale. If you went and bought meat, you would weigh it on this thing. And also meat wrappers — if you went and bought ground chuck and it’s wrapped in a plastic wrap, there’s a machine that does that, a $50,000 machine. They had never had a marketing department. B2B is historically terrible at marketing. This guy who came from Whirlpool was like, we want to become a marketing-oriented B2B company. And I was like, that could be cool.

That was ITW, who also happens to be the grandfathers of the 80/20 principle. I was able to learn the 80/20 principle, bring marketing to them. We did great. We combined with a European company. I ended up being the global marketing director, and then when he got promoted, I took over his job as the boss. So that was the first time running a company. At that point I’m about 36 years old.

I actually never was a consultant. I’ve been in the trenches the whole time. After that, he and one other person who had left ITW came to me and said, “We’ve got a $50 million shopping cart manufacturer that we want you to run and turn around and do the same thing you did at ITW.” So I did that. When I got canned during COVID, I was like, all right, I don’t want to have a boss again. That was terrible. So I’m going to go buy my own company.

I took every dollar I had, bought a manufacturing company, doubled that and sold it during COVID after about 3 years. Then the same group of people came back to me again at a new company and said, “Hey, heard you sold your company. We’d like you to run a bigger company here in Cleveland.” So I came over and I’m doing it all again.

I’ve always been the guy running the company. I’ve never done consulting. I like being in the trenches and doing the work. The book is the first time I’m ever teaching it. What I tell people is I’m not selling anything other than books and occasional speeches. I just like talking about it. I like telling people how to do it. I like answering questions and watching other people get to go and do it.

Host: I want to ask you about the company you bought and sold. I want to dive into that a little bit. What type of company was it? And then when you bought it, what were the main things you were able to do or what did you notice right away that you were able to fix in order to sell it in 3 years?

Todd: A lot of what you’ll find if you start looking me up or looking at my website is talking about stagnation. Stagnation can be lack of innovation, lack of talent, not spending your money on the right things, hanging on to your old products and trying to milk that sacred cow for too long.

What I did is I found a 50-year-old plastic manufacturing company. It was really funny actually. When you buy a company, you’ve got to go out and see what’s for sale and talk to people. I probably deep dived on 50-plus companies and then I ended up buying one that was 30 minutes away. I’m looking all around the country thinking I might have to move here to find what I want, and I ended up buying one that was 30 minutes away.

They were about a 50-year-old company, family company. In small business world, it’s really interesting. These guys were just making enough money that they were happy. They were probably working 12 hours a week and just making a few hundred thousand. I was like, okay, I’m going to take this job, I’m going to work 50 hours a week, I’m going to change everything and do all the things we’ve done in this small business setting.

Wasn’t quite as easy as said as done because now it’s your money. Getting rid of a customer when it’s your money is a lot harder than when it’s not your money. But the very first thing I did was realize that the 80/20 principle — they were just trying to be everything to everyone and had all these products that didn’t make any sense. When I really cut it down, it was just this handful of products and customer combos that made all the money. So I just cut everything else.

That is hard because now I went from X amount of millions of dollars in revenue to X times 80%. I lost 20% of the business. The good news is all that time they were wasting on this other stuff, we were diving back into the really profitable stuff. That worked really well.

Then the other thing is they didn’t like taking price increases, and the tariffs and all that stuff that was happening at the time made it so that I had to do it anyway. So then I just got aggressive with it and really went at it and turned the profit profile of the business around. Then we also invented a product that allowed us to go into more things.

The really bad thing that happened is I went a little hypomanic and I ended up buying four companies and put it into this portfolio company. The first company did great. The other one struggled a little bit. But the first company really did — we basically doubled our money in three years and sold it.

Host: What types of plastics were you manufacturing?

Todd: If you can think of big chemical tanks — the chemicals are so nasty that they’ll eat through the metal. We were putting plastic liners in the tank. So instead of buying a new $50,000 tank every 5 years, you could buy a $5,000 liner every 3 years, pull it out real quick, and not lose your tank.

That’s actually a pretty decent business. It was kind of cool, but really again — where most of the money in the world is made is in these super boring businesses. What do you do? I take plastic, I weld it together in an interesting shape, and then it stops sulfuric acid from eating a metal tank. That’s really boring, but at the same time, there’s not a whole lot of people that do it. The best way to get into it is to buy a company that already does it because then you don’t have to go out and buy half a million dollars of machines and come up with the whole thing yourself. It was actually a lot of fun. I’m still involved at the company.

Host: I want to talk to you — I feel like this is something that kind of gets brushed over a little bit — buying and selling a business. What was the process like buying it? Were you using a broker? Were you searching on the internet? And then how did you go about selling it?

Todd: Interesting actually because one of the businesses I then bought afterwards was a business broker. So I’ve been a broker. I’ve bought some businesses and I’ve sold businesses, so I can talk pretty well to this.

The most common way — there are a couple websites out there, BizBuySell and there’s another one that will list most businesses that are for sale. Most businesses end up on those, especially for people like you and I who are going to buy our first small business in the SBA-type dollar amount. That’s a great place to start. It also allows you to look at a bunch of businesses fast. You reach out to them, say, “Hey, I’m interested.” They might make you fill out some financials just to make sure you’ve got enough money to do it. But on that note, you usually only need 10 to 20% down. So if you’ve got $100,000, you can buy a million-dollar business if you do it right.

Then they send you all their financials and you can dig in. They’ll have a whole marketing packet and you can dig into businesses and figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what looks bad, what doesn’t, what scares you, what doesn’t. It’s a really good idea to just come up with the profile, the type of business you’re looking for.

For me, I’ve always been a fan of — if it’s manufacturing, it doesn’t matter. I build $50 shopping carts and right now I build multi-million-dollar food equipment. It’s all the same to me. It’s all the same process. But a lot of people have their niche, and you want to stay in your niche if you’re good at something. That’s where I did get myself in trouble — picking something I wasn’t good at. That’s the one business I didn’t do well in.

But that’s essentially it — you go to BizBuySell. That’s how I did my first one. My second one that way. The third one was through networking. I have a startup also that was through networking. But I love that method.

Now, if you’re looking for somebody who does it differently, look at Cody Sanchez. She’s got a great method about how to go out there and proactively get people before they’re on the market. There’s a huge amount of baby boomers out there who need to retire, and now is a great time to be approaching them with proactive offers. You can buy them differently and better if you can get somebody who happens to listen to you before they’re interested in selling. But the most common, easiest, and most traditional way is to look at stuff that’s for sale with a business broker. It still takes nine to 12 months to sell a business. So you’re usually not having to make super fast decisions. You can really take your time and look at 50 businesses and figure out what you like.

Host: And is that how you sold the business after 3 years? Did you list it on BizBuySell or how did you do that?

Todd: I actually was kind of my own broker because I had the broker at the time. I used somebody inside of my company to do it all. But yeah, I did it through traditional means and I had probably seven offers at different times. We waited for the right offer and got it done.

Host: Awesome. Congratulations on that. That’s a crazy turnaround. That’s an awesome story. I also want to touch on — you said at that time you bought three other businesses that weren’t as successful. Tell me what those businesses were and can you identify a couple reasons why they weren’t able to achieve the success that the first one did?

Todd: The least successful one is one I still own. It’s a flooring business — flooring retail and installer. The biggest reason that wasn’t a success is because I knew nothing about it. I had basically convinced myself at that point that I could do anything. If the financials look good, I could figure out how to make the financials better. But it wasn’t manufacturing. None of these things that I’m talking about in the book really applied as well to this one. And I was splitting my focus between multiple businesses. I wasn’t in it 50 hours a week. I had a GM and I was trusting them to implement the stuff that I was trying to do.

On top of that, it was terrible timing because COVID had kept everybody home. So they were doing all their remodels and the financials were inflated because the remodel market had gone crazy. Then the tariffs hit and prices went through the roof. Everybody had just finished their remodels and then prices went through the roof and the whole industry just collapsed. A lot of people have gone out of business. I still own it. It’s not killing me or anything, but it’s not a great business.

The business broker I bought pretty cheap. It was a licensing deal. That was easy. I made money on that when I exited it. I actually made a lot of money because I saved the 10% of what I would have paid selling the first business. So that ended up being a real good deal.

Then the startup is actually doing real well right now. We just raised some money. We’re valued at about $4 million and I’m the major shareholder there. Player One Energy — it’s basically Bitcoin and oil.

Host: Wow. That’s pretty interesting. How did you get into Bitcoin and oil? I mean, you kind of talked about being in boring businesses. What made you venture off into something like that?

Todd: When you’ve got extra money, you’re always looking for stuff to do. That first one started making a bunch of money. I started trying to figure out how do I parlay this into more things. I had a buddy who was involved in one of the first wells where people were Bitcoin mining off of an oil well. How that works is the gas, the methane output, can be put into a generator, used for fuel, and then mine the Bitcoin right there on site.

It’s not something a lot of people know how to do. Usually you’re either good at Bitcoin or you’re good at oil and gas. He learned both sides of that because he was involved in this early company that was doing it, who’s now a multi-billion-dollar company. The whole time we were just talking like, man, we got to get into this business somehow. When he left that company, we started working on our own and trying to figure it out. We’ve made six pivots, probably pretty hard pivots, as we’ve gone through our bootstrap journey. Really it was my company that was paying for everything as we were bootstrapping it through. Then we finally got some customers and we’re sitting in pretty good shape right now.

We’ve got a couple different business models now. We do some on-grid, but we also do the off-grid, and we’ve also got a helium play out in Kansas that we’re working on. It’s pretty cool. But I’m not — I’m the chairman. I talk to the investors. I talk to the banks. But I’ve got other guys who run the day-to-day business on that one.

Host: Are you a big Bitcoin person? Do you really believe in it?

Todd: I do. I believe in it, but I’m not a big guy. I don’t have a ton of money in it other than all the money I’ve put into this company. In my mind, that’s how I invest in Bitcoin. I’m going to make money because that company becomes $50 million, not because Bitcoin goes to $200,000. But that company is only going to get to $50 million if Bitcoin goes to $200,000. So I believe in it enough to have put six figures into it. But it’s not six figures in Bitcoin — I might have been better off right now if I had done that. But hopefully I’ll be better off in the long term doing it the way I did it. But yeah, I’m a believer. Anytime we have a Bitcoin podcast, I send one of the other guys. I’m not the guy to talk about the mechanics of it.

Host: Well, the one thing we can talk about with Bitcoin — you kind of touched on libertarianism in the beginning. You kind of have a libertarian streak. You ran for local office at one point. Bitcoin’s very favorable amongst libertarians because of the Austrian economics behind it — you can’t print more of it, it’s fixed. I kind of want to dive into that a little bit. Is that what interests you in Bitcoin? And then also talk to me about how you got into becoming a libertarian and what made you fall into those beliefs.

Todd: I’ll start with that one because that was first. In 2016, during the whole Trump-Cruz thing, I kind of got disillusioned with the Republican Party. I’d been a pretty hardcore Republican for a long time. When I was 20, I ran for city council in Ann Arbor. So I’ve been political for some time. But I’ve always lived in places where it didn’t make sense to run as a Republican.

After that first one, I was just like, I’m not going to do that anymore, but I’ll just write on it and do this and that. In 2016, I was finally like, I’m done. The party had shifted so dramatically. It wasn’t even super conservative back in 2000 when I ran. It had already started to go with the War on Terror and all that stuff a couple years later. But we just got so far away from being small government.

I said, okay, I need to find a different party. I started looking at all the third parties. Interestingly, I had known about libertarian Republicans for a long time because I actually lived in an adjacent county to Amash in Michigan. I was very familiar with him and what a libertarian Republican was. I didn’t even know there was a Libertarian Party at all. I’d never heard of it before and found it as I was going through and looking at all the third-party platforms. When I found it, I was like, man, this is a perfect fit.

I just decided I was going to be a libertarian. Austin Petersen was running for president at that point in time and he had a really cool platform. I didn’t really like Gary Johnson, but it was what it was. I got excited about Austin Petersen, stayed after that. Then I started getting involved, especially after I left Ohio and went to Oklahoma. The Oklahoma party was really cool and I got involved with them. I ran for state corporation commission, actually set a record there for 345,000 votes, and we got ballot access.

I had a really good time with them, and then I became the national treasurer of the party for a couple years. I was happy in the Oklahoma politics and then got involved in the national politics over the last few years, and finally got out of there about a year and a half ago.

Host: So you’re not really involved much anymore?

Todd: I moved back to Ohio. The Ohio Party doesn’t fit my style as well. I love them. They’re fine. It doesn’t fit my style as well. I’m new and I don’t want to force my way in and try to be in charge. So I’m just focusing on business. I take the calls if they call, I email them if I have something to say, but for the most part I just kind of lay back and give them some money every once in a while.

Host: I’m curious to know — you had a lot of involvement with the party. What do you think the future of the party should look like? Should we play — in this last election, the old chair kind of positioned us as kind of a make-or-break a little bit, wanted to play kingmaker instead of being like, hey, we’re going to try to run our candidate because we knew we couldn’t win. Do you think that there’s a long-term strategy where a viable third-party option, the Libertarian, could be on the ballot in every state and could actually win an election? Or do you think they should just start playing to one side or the other to start getting some concessions?

Todd: I was very against that strategy and still very against that strategy. People have tried that strategy for 20-plus years. It’s never worked. It didn’t work this time. We got somebody who is not at all libertarian. He’s showing that every day of the week. There were “concessions” — we pretend like Free Ross happened because of us. That was lobbied for his entire first term. There’s very powerful Republican congressmen that were in his ear for the last eight years on that and it had nothing to do with us.

No, I don’t believe that is the way forward. In fact, we had been on a very nice upswing from 0.5% of the vote to over 3% of the vote in 2016. Fell back a little in 2020 and 2024 where we had less than good candidates in my opinion. That obviously impacts the situation.

But if you look at the generational gaps, what you’re seeing is every generation is becoming more and more third-party friendly. It is not going the other way. It’s going towards third party or at least towards the ability or willingness to shift from party to party, especially prior to the election. Everybody towards the end of the election gets into this “it’s either A or B” mentality. But as you get into the election, people are much more open to third parties.

There will come a time where somebody has enough money — I thought it was going to be Bloomberg for a while, where he was just going to come in and put enough money in. Not libertarian, but just third party in general. There’s going to be a time when somebody has enough money, they’ve got the right character running, and we will get some serious third-party politicians in place. We want to be the party that has the history and has the mechanics. It’s hard to get 50-state ballot access. RFK couldn’t do it. He struggled like crazy. We know how to do it. There’s going to be a time where we attract the right people and we have some chances. It’ll probably happen more in the non-presidential races. There’s a lot of reasons you have to run president — it’s mostly for that ballot access. But I’m not in favor of that plan. I understand the good and the bad that came with it. I was very against it when I was on the board and she had started to put that in place.

Host: Just to clarify — you were against the plan of not actually running someone for president, just trying to play spoiler?

Todd: That was never actually the plan to not run somebody, but there was kind of this hidden plan to support Trump. Kind of in plain sight.

Host: Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on what you just said. You kind of talked about Bobby Kennedy having trouble. My biggest problem is I feel like the system’s rigged against a third party. Bobby Kennedy spent so much of his time trying to get on the ballot in these states. He was getting sued. The system really isn’t built for a third party — though I don’t like it this way, I’d like to have a viable third-party option. Also, libertarians in my opinion are too unorganized. You have libertarians that are like open borders, license plates are tyranny. And then you have more of a directional libertarian or more of a principled libertarian where it’s like, no, we have to have some sort of order here, but the government’s overreach is just too far. Where do you find a happy medium? And if you want to really unite libertarians and get the message out there for everyone to understand, you have to kind of be on the same page.

Todd: Great set of questions. A couple things. Being in the Republican Party for a number of years, what I can tell you is they’re just as messed up as us. They’re just as wide a swath of people. I was Tea Party. There were the traditional Warhawk Republicans. It’s just as bad in every party as far as the infighting goes.

The difference is the Republicans and the Democrats all rally around the winner. We don’t. The other difference is they have a much more robust way of picking the winner so that by the time they win, everyone is rallied around them. Concessions have been made on the inside and they’re fine. They’ve got this “it’s either A or B” mentality which helps — I think I voted for McCain when I was a Republican. I hated McCain. I absolutely hated that guy. But it was what it was. He was better than Kerry.

I think it’s not any different in our party than other people’s parties. We just don’t have any money, which is a problem. It’s a $2 million budget. Most Republican congressmen have $2 million budgets and the whole party has a $2 million budget for the Libertarian Party. That’s a huge problem.

The second problem is the way we pick our candidate is just ridiculous. Now, it probably isn’t going to change, and there’s a certain — you got to love it if you’re in the party. It is fun. The nominee gets picked basically at convention. You go into convention, you have no idea who’s going to be the presidential candidate, and then you have multiple rounds of voting at convention and you end up with the president. You could literally announce that morning and end up as president and not have run any campaign for a year before that. So it’s fun but stupid.

Host: I mean, to kind of touch on what you mentioned about the money and how everyone rallies around their candidate whether it be Democrat or Republican — libertarians don’t do that. I don’t think Chase Oliver was a great candidate. You have people in the libertarian party — the Mises Caucus, Dave Smith — they’re kind of viewing things more through an economic lens, where I felt like Chase Oliver was more of a socially small-government liberal person. He didn’t even have the biggest guys in the party like Dave Smith supporting him. Like openly being like, “I can’t support this guy” — you’ve already lost. Angela McArdle really wasn’t even backing him. She was all on the Trump train — we’re going to get Ross out, we’re going to vote for Trump. I definitely think you’re spot on there, and that’s a major problem. That’s why I say libertarians have to unite and say, okay, what’s our platform going to be? And also — we’ve got to be on the debate stage. We had Ross Perot out there back in the ’90s. The libertarian candidate must be on that debate stage if they want to start gaining traction.

Todd: A couple things there. I forgot that part of your question — why don’t we unite and rally around? The biggest reason I think is branding. We know what Democrats are — Democrats care about poor people, they’re not going to let people die on the street. Half of that stuff’s not true, but everybody can kind of list off what a Democrat is. Small government, low taxes, low regulation — that’s Republicans. None of that’s true either. They’re big government, big regulation, and they got plenty of taxes. But everyone can spout off that that’s what it is. They have this branding done where you can feel like, even though I hate McCain, he’s going to stand for this stuff, and that’s better than Kerry.

We don’t have that. We’ve never had that. We’ve been very poor — to your point, are you the Mises libertarian? Are you the pragmatic libertarian? Or are you the radical libertarian? Those three are very different. And then you’ve got the anarchists. That’s like every party except that in every other party, they’ve got this higher banner of “we all do fall into this definition.” We don’t have that.

That is not that hard. I ran for chair actually in 2019 before the 2020 election. I ran for national chair and that was one of the biggest things I was saying — we need the branding. We need the 30 seconds where every single libertarian can be like, “Hey, we’re for the minimum government possible, the maximum freedom possible,” and these are the three or four things that we all agree on. We can have a spectrum of how much drug legalization or what we want to do from the social standpoint or the economic standpoint. We can have a spectrum, but these are the things we agree on. We’re not even there. That’s a huge problem.

Frankly, to your point, I didn’t even vote for Chase and I was openly against him. I thought he was a terrible candidate. I’m done voting for people I don’t believe in. That’s why I left the Republican Party. Somebody asked me today, are you a big-L or a little-L libertarian? And I said both. And he goes, you can’t be both. And I’m like, actually, you can. Because I’m a very principled little-L libertarian who will not vote for the big-L candidate, but I also strongly believe in the party to the point where I’ve served. I consider myself a big-L, but that doesn’t mean they own my vote. I’m going to vote for who I want to. Frankly, in the last election, I didn’t vote at all because all three of them were terrible.

Host: In the last election, I’m in the state of New York and Chase Oliver wasn’t even on the ballot. I went to the polls and I looked at it — it’s like, man, I really can’t vote for Harris, and man oh man, I really can’t vote for Trump. So I ended up writing in Ron Paul — my hero. I was like, well, what am I supposed to do? I didn’t want to not vote, but at the same time I knew my vote wouldn’t matter. I’m in the state of New York. What do you think of starting to have, instead of having a Libertarian Party sprout up and be a viable option, libertarians kind of hijacking the Republican Party to start running as Republicans? I mean, socialists are doing it on the Democratic side.

Todd: Thomas Massie’s a popular guy. It’s been tried so many times and it’s just never worked. The idea is you will have characters who can do it inside of very small congressional districts. Massie and Ron Paul — they did it inside of just a normal congressional district. They had name recognition. They came in, got elected for other reasons other than being a libertarian. Just kind of veered libertarian or that was their brand, but they were never saying the word.

Ron Paul was a little different because he ended up running as a presidential candidate for the libertarians in ’88. But that was after he was congressman — that wasn’t his lead into it. But even those guys — would they have been elected senator? I don’t know. Rand Paul is certainly not a super libertarian. He has to veer to the center or to the GOP hard often. He’s always supporting things that aren’t libertarian. He comes out good every three months on an issue and he’s got a lot of great views. I like him. He’s probably the best senator. But he’s not a Massie libertarian.

Could that guy even win a statewide election as a purebred libertarian Republican? I don’t think so. Because there’s so much money in the Republican Party, they’re not going to let it happen. Even Trump is trying to primary Massie again. You can’t do it inside the party. They’re too big. If they decide to crush you, then they crush you. Just like Ron Paul got screwed in 2012. He had way more support at different points in time than he ended up with because they just came in and crushed him.

That’s my opinion. Now, what can we do to fix our party? The 50-state ballot access is a problem. I was on the committee. I know how it works and how you spend the money to get it done and how we have to use our volunteers. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to have the party with this history because we know how to get it done. Now, we didn’t have the money last time. I think we ended up on 46 ballots or something like that. New York was one of the ones I was actually arguing that we can’t be on — I was the treasurer at the time, so I could see the money and go, it’s not worth spending $250,000 to get on this ballot and get 0% of the vote. But I am a big 50-state guy if you can afford it.

Essentially, in order for a third party to work, you’ve got to get to 50 states. Most of the time, in order to get to 50 states, you have to have a presidential candidate. There’s several states that have other ways to do it like Oklahoma, and I think New York might have a couple different ways to get on it too. But a lot of them are pure presidential candidate — if you don’t have one, you don’t get ballot access, so you’ve got to go out and get it every time.

Host: Well, last thing here on the libertarian politics aspect. You kind of talked about someone coming through with money and mentioned Mike Bloomberg might be someone like that. I heard a quote a long time ago that said the worst thing you can be in politics besides wrong is boring. I like Mike Bloomberg, but I think of that — he’s boring as a politician. And so I kind of fear — if we need someone with money, obviously someone like Elon Musk comes to mind and someone else that comes to mind is Jack Dorsey. Do you think there’s ever a realistic possibility that maybe the Libertarian Party can connect with someone like that and see what can be done?

Todd: Just to be clear, because I’ll probably get a bunch of hate mail — I’m not a Bloomberg guy. He just happens to be somebody who was willing to put a billion dollars into a run. That’s what it would take, especially for him who didn’t have a party around him. He was just going to run as an independent, but that was a legitimate rumor for a while.

I think what you’ll see is — RFK should have honestly done this. He really should have, a year before he wanted to run, decided he was going to do Libertarian, gone after the nomination and gotten it. Then he wouldn’t have had to spend all that money on the ballot access. He’s close enough to our views that he could have gotten closer and probably won. But that’s not what he chose to do. He chose to do it wrong, very similar to how Amash chose to do it wrong and came in at the last second and tried to get anointed king of the libertarians.

Some big name — you could think of people like Dorsey, you could think of people like Cuban, who again has very non-libertarian views. But if he spends enough time and money getting close to the party and learning about the party and meeting people in the party, you could see a Cuban-type person. You could certainly end up seeing some of these Bitcoin billionaires, Bitcoin millionaires, or some of the Hollywood-type folks who are coming in a little more conservative. Like the Pellegrinos — I don’t know if you know Mark Pellegrino. He’s really cool on Twitter. He’s Lucifer on Supernatural. There’s some actors out there now that have these views, make this money, and they’ve got the name recognition. He’s not a libertarian, but he’s close.

I could see somebody like that — a character we can all get around, who could raise money if they don’t have the money, and get the entire party excited. RFK had a golden opportunity in the Libertarian Party and he blew it because he tried too hard to stick with the Democrats and then came in and tried to kind of put one foot in the race and it just wasn’t going to work. Had he spent a year doing it the right way, he would have for sure been the nominee. He would have been on 50 ballots because we would have had more money. That would have been the way to do it.

Host: Man, I can’t even imagine what the election would have turned out if he was able to do that. That’s crazy to think about.

Todd: And unfortunately he might have still done the same thing and made a deal at the last minute, which would have been terrible for the party. But had he run all the way, he probably would have been our best libertarian candidate ever. We would have for sure gotten more than Gary Johnson. It would have been a 4% to 10% finish — maybe more. I think you could have gotten into Ross Perot territory. So that would have been interesting, but we’ll see what happens.

Host: I did read an article the other day that said — obviously a big story in the last election was the shift especially with young men — and it said young men are really moving away from Trump and kind of MAGA, but they’re not going back to the Democrats. They’re very open to exploring a third party or someone different. I think that’s interesting. We’ll see what happens. I’m always excited to watch what develops.

Todd: I think JD Vance has a legitimate shot. If you’ve ever sat down and listened to him, I think he’s got a legitimate shot. He’s so much more of a libertarian than he ever was or could be. He’s only got a few issues that he’s bad on, and even those, he’s bad inside of the libertarian tent. He’s going to run for — I think he’s running for governor of our state of Ohio. And I frankly would not oppose that. I might still vote for the Libertarian if it comes out as somebody good. But somebody like him, where he has a big enough name profile and can raise enough money and get the forces — that’d be interesting. It wouldn’t be billionaire style, but it’d be a real good candidate.

Host: Absolutely. We’ll see what happens. Time will tell. Last question I got for you, Todd, before we wrap it up here. You have so much experience, you’ve done so much in the business world, you’ve overcome so many things. What’s some advice you have for a young person that’s starting out in their career, just finishing college? How do they get on the right track?

Todd: Two pieces of advice. First advice is don’t get pigeonholed into what you have to do now. You don’t have to decide right this second what you’re going to be in the future. But know that the faster you decide, probably the better you’re going to be. So try everything early on. Figure out — I thought I wanted to be a stockbroker forever. Turns out it was not that fun. You didn’t get to do any stocks. It was all cold calling. And then by the time I ran the bank, which was still early — I was still only 25 — then it was like, oh, okay, I like being in charge. I like running a business and turning it around. That’s when I decided that that’s what I was going to do. It allowed me to change my trajectory and then really plot out the whole career way before it happened.

Think about the long term all the time. Don’t get stuck in a job if it’s not where you’re going to be. You need to get out and find a spot that’s better for you. You’re going to like your job a lot if you’re working towards the long term. Right now I love my job. I run a big business. I have a lot of fun. We make a lot of money. It’s just really good to go to work and enjoy what you do. Most people don’t get to do that. It’s because they’re scared to leave jobs. They’re scared to jump industries. They’re scared to make a change. It’s all this stagnation stuff. You have to be willing to say, “Hey, I want to write a book, so I’m going to write a book.” I want to stop being a business person and be a teacher, so I’m going to go and do that. And then figure out your life around it.

Host: Awesome. I love that, Todd. Thanks so much for giving me some time here. This was an awesome conversation. I hope we can do it again down the line.

Todd: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Host: Of course.